At this point Jack Goldstein paintings should come with a trigger warning.
Seeing this 1988 painting at Phillips reminded me of Michael Connor’s 2013 Rhizome interview with Lorne Lanning, who’d been Goldstein’s assistant during this era. Goldstein was deeply interested in painting spectacular images like the computers that generated them, and Lanning, then just 20, figured out how. It involved mind-blowing amounts of pre-mixing, taping, and airbrushing, building up the painted surface into a topographical relief map of color layers.
Of course, Lanning also had a front row seat to Goldstein’s drug use, which only escalated after they moved to get away from it, to an isolated farm upstate. What I remembered most about Lanning’s interview was the ease with which he transitioned from Goldstein’s studio to working for a weapons manufacturer on Reagan’s Star Wars defense system [crossover bonus: it was TRW, the same company where the Wongs of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ first portrait commission worked!]
Computer graphics was my medium, but there was no market. So the only place you could learn the craft of it was in aerospace. So I went and I’m working to visualize these really hi-tech weapons systems… By this point, I’m looking at the industry of war and the industry of media kind of as one and the same.
Lanning took the place of Ashley Bickerton who, just a few months earlier, had published his own gonzo account of working for Goldstein in 1982 on a previous series of work, the Blitzkrieg paintings. Bickerton’s story was published in a little catalogue for a 2012 show, “Where is Jack Goldstein?” at Venus Over Manhattan. [Bickerton’s writings, including “Jack & Me” (pdf), are on his website.]
I enquired when did he want to start, he replied, “What’s wrong with right now?” Holy crap, this was deep fast. I asked what I should work on, thinking of some little test performed on paper to showcase my technique for his approval. Instead he pointed to a huge eight-foot by twelve-foot empty black canvas and handed me a small four by five inch grainy photo and said, “Paint this on that!” I said, “You gotta be kidding? I can’t just walk in and do that. Couldn’t we at least start on something smaller?” “No man, I trust you!” And with that began one of the strangest chapters of my life.
He showed me how they used auto pin-liners to make the white lines of the explosion trails. This was very naked work that necessitated a ‘one shot, one kill’ degree of calm accuracy, I wasn’t sure I was capable of such extreme control. It turned out I wasn’t. Nevertheless I threw myself into that canvas with all the lust of youth, fearlessly, or maybe recklessly, wheeling out great arcing white lines across those matt black fields.
Was the intensely strafed 8×12 canvas at the center of Lindemann’s show the one Bickerton made that first day? Was the entire art world of the 70s and 80s really built on a foundation of obtuse French theory, petty competition and corruption, money and meth? Maybe it was just you? The defensive rhetorical shots Bickerton takes in his intro [“This is my story of Jack Goldstein, not the oft-told tale of CalArts Mafias and intrepid theoretical encampments on the blank spots of the map.”] feels like friendly fire.
If Richard Hertz’s 2004 book, Jack Goldstein and The CalArts Mafia didn’t establish the entire genre of WTF Jack Goldstein oral history, it certainly set the standard. Hertz and Goldstein put the book together through a sprawling series of interviews in 2001-2003. A pdf version is circulating, but the best precis I’ve found online is an archived review [doc?] by Chris Kraus:
For the next two years, the two met regularly in Chinatown. Hertz drew Goldstein out, tape-recording and dramatizing all their conversations. After five months, it occurred to Hertz that the artist’s crazy, fractured, yet devastatingly accurate, narratives could be augmented by commentary from some of Goldstein’s contemporaries. These included John Baldessari, Rosetta Brooks, Robert Longo, James Welling and Meg Cranston. The resulting work, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, is much more than a sympathetic portrait of Goldstein’s life. It is a secret history of the LA and New York art worlds.
Lanning’s embodiment of the Viriliovian collapse of art, media, and war snapped something for me, changing my view of Goldstein’s spectacle works in ways even the chaotic gossip didn’t. It was like finding out [just now!] that Goldstein hid the source of one of his breakout film loop works, the diving figure in The Jump (1978): he appropriated it from Olympia (1938), by Leni f’ing Riefenstahl.
But wait! In Pictures and the Past, his 2024 study of the Pictures Generation’s relationship to spectacle and fascist aesthetics, art historian Alexander Bigman checked the logs, and found that the rotoscoped figures in The Jump do not actually map onto any of the divers in Olympia.
Bigman traced the earliest mention of Goldstein using Olympia footage to a “rumor” that circulated “in the gallery show” when The Jump debuted, at The Kitchen in 1979. It was first printed in 2003, when Vera Dika reconstructed this influential debut in her book, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film. Upon inquiry, however, Dika reveals to Bigman that the source of the rumor was Goldstein himself. Which makes a certain problematic sense. Riefenstahl’s aesthetic “rehabilitation” was in full swing, and Helene Winer, Goldstein’s partner in the 70s, confirmed to Bigman that among their crowd then, “the merest reference to high diving would have been enough to summon Riefenstahl’s oeuvre and all its toxic baggage.”
Bigman argues, then, that Goldstein wasn’t critiquing fascist spectacle through appropriation, but through approximation. He was trying to expose the manipulative power of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetics’ by using them himself, critically, and by implicating the viewer in the process:
Goldstein’s gesture clearly addressed the proliferation of postwar American spectacle culture specifically. But it might also point twoard the intrinsically politicized nature of cultural memory in any context, and thus its susceptibility to manipulation for good or ill. Not only does The Jump register the anxieties regarding mass media and social control that are commonly attributed to it under the sign “fascism,” then, but it also reveals the inextricability of historical perception itself, including hte changing cultural imagination of fascism, from this very problematic.
Bigman’s take on this is intriguing, and I’m definitely going to read the rest of the book, but watching The Jewish Museum’s 2013 exhibition of The Jump on every screen in Times Square as part of their Goldstein retrospective, the line between fascist aesthetics and ironic fascist aesthetics feels a little lost. And it’s not like our culture’s been inoculated against fascist manipulation in the dozen years since.